One of my favourite urban legends is the story about how cake mixes were first a commercial failure because customers felt uneasy about putting a cake together with just powder and water. It’s not true, of course: sales of cake mixes doubled initially after World War 2, but that’s a whole other story.
I bring it up because for better or worse, the idea that people were more comfortable adding an egg and butter to their cake mix has stuck. And it turns out that Corsair, GIGABYTE and NVIDIA are pulling a similar trick with PC builds.
Retailers have been selling packages of parts for aeons now. The most common are those CPU/motherboard deals. Some of them come with RAM. Some might even come with a hard drive. But they’re basically your bog standard “upgrade” kit: here’s the new CPU you want, here’s a motherboard that supports the CPU’s socket, and a few extras to go with it.
The other route for those too lazy to build their own PC in the first place: a pre-built system. It’s always fun when someone else does it for you, but you’re often charged a premium.
Corsair, GIGABYTE and NVIDIA are teaming up to do something slightly different. It’s basically a full PC for $1099, with the difference being that you build it yourself — and if you need help, there’s a three-part video series on how to put it together.
The $1099 build is being sold as Centre Com, Umart, PLE and PC Case Gear and has the following specs:
Intel i3-6100 CPU
Corsair 8GB DDR4 RAM
Corsair 128GB SSD
Western Digital 1TB Blue HDD
Corsair Obsidian 250D Case
Corsair VS550 power supply
GIGABYTE GA-150N Phoenix motherboard
GIGABYTE NVIDIA GTX 950 GPU
It’s not a bad little rig, provided you don’t try to max all the settings out and run your games at 4K. It’ll be demoed at RFLAN in Curtin University tomorrow, if you’re going, and there’s even a video online of how to do some simple vinyl modding if you want to trick it out further.
Comments
8 responses to “Corsair And GIGABYTE Are Getting Creative With Pre-Built PCs”
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not a bad little system for that price, and the some assembly required nature is great for people looking to build their own system without worrying about compatibility and so on
That’s exactly me. Happy to pick out nearly all the parts but don’t want to worry about compatibility between anything and with sufficient cooling/space etc. Hell it’s hard enough for me to know whether a specific GPU will fit in the case with the correct power pins etc.
I would be interested in one of these if they gave an option to choose a random GPU.
Cake mixes are now made to “require” an egg. It is no myth.
The myth was that people weren’t buying cake mixes until they required a fresh egg because people felt uneasy about making a cake from just powder + water. Reality was that people were buying heaps of cake mix — and the companies that put out the products were having massive internal debates from the off about whether to include powdered egg in the mix itself, or to have customers use fresh eggs. It’s all on Snopes.
Pretty interesting idea except for the fact that it’s just as much of a ripoff as the prebuilt ones. You could do an equivalent build for $850-900 without sales or 800 if you waited for parts to be on sale. If I waited for sales I could easily do an i5 + GTX970/R9390 build for the price of this.
This could be a really good way of getting people into PC gaming if someone did it without charging $300 more than the pieces are worth.
Yea that’s the thing. They are charging pre-built prices yet you have to build it. And honestly those specs are outdated already :p
Mmm, just priced the listed pieces from live staticice prices and came to $994 for me if i selected only places within a reasonable travel time to pick up from.
Of course you could do better by hand picking parts and not paying for any feature bloat you don’t need, but its really not that much higher than retail for that list of parts…
That’s a pretty cool idea, even if it does kind of ruin the whole point of building your own (in my opinion you build your own to spend extra or less on areas that matter more or less to you, more on the GPU and less on the CPU is a popular option, but also case, ram, storage and cooling are all areas you can pretty safely spend more or less on without bottlenecking your system if you’re careful about how you do it). Still though, getting compatible parts can look pretty daunting at first and if this sort of thing helps people that’s great.